Here at Misc., your officially not-as-funny-as-it-thinks-it-is column, we’re intrigued by the recent New York magazine headline, “Can Estrogen Make You Smarter?” You can just bet all the natural-superiority-of-women advocates are smugly gloating over their faxed third-generation photocopies of the article in college faculty lounges across North America. If the claims of the researchers quoted in the piece get confirmed, it’d sure make an easier argument for fem-dom supporters than the now-traditional rants against testosterone (since the latter hormone actually exists in humans of all genders). And I’m sure birth-control pills would mix perfectly into those rave-dance “smart cocktails.” I just hope the theory doesn’t inspire phrenologists (those folks who claim they can measure intelligence via the size and shape of someone’s skull) to start testing a little lower on the body.

UPDATE: The Newmark Cinema, which I said last month oughta be appropriated for fringe-theater use, has since been temporarily used just for that purpose. The Brown Bag Theater had to temporarily vacate its space elsewhere in the building, and so used one of the recently abandoned movie spaces for its production Wanna Come Back To My Place And Justify My Existence?

AD SLOGAN OF THE WEEK: “Redhook. It’s not just a beer, it’s a companion.” Is that meant as a reassurance or as an AA recruiter’s threat?

THE DESTRUCTION CONTINUES: Another of Seattle’s ever-dwindling supply of classic American-style eateries, the Nitelite in the Moore Hotel, just reopened with a new look (all spackled-brown in that pretentiously “unpretentious” way) and a new menu (featuring chicken scarpariello, bistecca melange, and mixed-grill kabobs). At least the Nitelite’s truly lovely bar wasn’t altered a bit. The bar, in fact, stayed open all the weeks the restaurant part was closed for remodeling; something the Liquor Board wouldn’t have allowed just a few years back.

YOU MAKE THE CALL: Paul Allen’s established a company related to the new Seahawk stadium project, named 1st & Goal Enterprises. I wouldn’t be surprised if he sets that up as an address to the new stadium, making up a Goal Street as a short access road from 1st Ave. S. I was always hoping the city would name a side street on the 4th Ave. S. side of the Kingdome “South Long Street,” so the Hawks would have the more appropriate street address of 4th & Long.

DRAWING THE LINE: Earlier this year, the P-I ran what it called a week-long test run of eight new comic strips. Those which proved most popular with readers, the paper claimed, would be added to an expanded Coffee Break section. This month, the paper added all eight newcomers. It made room by shrinking some Coffee Break features and dropping others–including Bill Griffith’s up-from-the-underground classic Zippy the Pinhead. None of the new strips so far show any wit or style or reason for being (other than demographic target-marketing) Some of the new batch are almost amazingly amateurishly drawn. (Hint to editors: Dilbert‘s popular in spite of its boxed-in look, not because of it.) The closest thing to an exception is the competent if unspectacular gagstrip Zits, by veteran stripper Jerry Scott and editorial cartoonist Jim Borgman.

Zippy, however, is a masterpiece of exquisite draftsmanship, precision dialogue, and multi-layered humor. It treats its readers not as statistics but as intelligent fun-lovers. And it loves to eat a great corn dog. Zippy is in the domain of the P-I‘s fellow Hearst subsidiary King Features Syndicate, as are four of the paper’s new comics. Back in the day, William Randolph Hearst made his papers run George Harriman’s now-acknowledged classic Krazy Kat even though it scored low in popularity polls, because Harriman’s surrealistic shenanigans added that little touch of quality Hearst’s papers sorely needed. The folks running today’s P-I (Hearst’s second-largest remaining daily paper) ought to do what the old man would’ve done and bring the Pinhead back.

Update: The day after this was posted, the P-I announced it would resume the Pinhead’s misadventures begginning on Labor Day. Yay!

WORD OF THE WEEK: “Aporia.”

(We’re still asking the question: Can you think of any formerly popular musical genre which hasn’t been the subject of an attempted “hip” revival in recent years? Make your recommendation at clark@speakeasy.org.)

CORREC: GameWorks does indeed have a Sonic the Hedgehog video game on the premises. Still no Crazy Climber, though…

THE MAILBAG (via Michael Jacobs): “I realize you’ve just lost all this weight and everything, but here’s the lowdown on a couple new candies. Starburst Fruit Twists: The ad looked good so I grabbed a pack. I was a bit disappointed. It was like flavored licorice, but made (I think) of that fruit-based plastic they use to make Dinosaurs fruit snacks, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fruit snacks etc. Only a little harder. Reese’s Crunchy Cookie Cups: Go find some! They’re like peanut butter cups, but the inner bottom has a chocolate cookie. It’s as if Reese took an Oreo side and built a peanut butter cup around it. Suprisingly, they’re better than you’d expect by far!”

GOING FLAT?: The Northwest microbrew craze may have peaked. A recent Puget Sound Business Journal piece by M. Sharon Baker described how, after growing 20 percent a month earlier this year, state microbrewery output fell 2.5 percent in November, the last month for which the Liquor Board had numbers. The questions: Have the indies taken as much business (now 8-10 percent of local beer sales) from the big boys as they’re gonna? Have bars run out of tap space for all the hefeweizens, porters, and ales? And has that Cocktail Nation fad permanently drawn young ladies & gents away from the foamy stuff? If the latter’s true, when will “microdistilleries” pop up?

BETWEEN THE LINES: Last time, I complained about word worship–the popular-in-highbrow-circles notion that the mere activity of reading, regardless of content, automatically makes you smarter. Now I wanna discuss the similar notion of word nostalgia–the longing for a past Golden Age of U.S. publishing. Mark Crispin Miller’s Nation cover story, “The Crushing Power of Big Publishing,” embraced this nostalgia as a contrast to today’s big-stakes, corporate-dominated bookland. In my recent feature piece about Amazon.com Books, I said early-20th-century publishing only seemed “purer” because it was a more elitist cabal reaching a much smaller audience.

Since then, I’ve found corroboration via The Wonderful World of Books, published in 1952 as part of a Federal program to encourage reading. (Yes! Even back when TV was still an expensive toy found mostly in the urban Northeast, society’s bigwigs worried about folks not reading enough.) Among essays by spirited-minded citizens extolling how books are fun and nonthreatening and good for you and you really should try a few, there were numbers on the narrow scope of books then. There were only 1,500 regular bookstores, plus another 1,000 outlets (department stores, church-supply stores, gift shops) where books were sold along with other stuff. Darn few of those were outside the big cities and college towns. Mass-market paperbacks were more readily available, but they only accounted for 900 titles a year (mostly hardcover reprints) from 21 publishers. The industry as a whole produced 11,000 titles a year back then, of which 8,600 were non-reprints (including 1,200 fiction titles and 900 kids’ selections). Only 125 companies put out five or more “trade” (bookstore-market) books a year. The book also noted, “The output of titles in England often exceeds that in the United States.”

Today, a U.S. population one-and-two-thirds times as big as that in 1952 gets to choose from five times as many new books, from hundreds of small and specialty presses as well as the corporate media Miller vilifies, sold just about everywhere (96 “Books–New” entries in the Seattle Yellow Pages alone). I won’t presume to compare the quality of today’s wordsmiths to Faulkner or Hemingway, but there’s plenty more styles and a helluva lot more races and genders on the stacks now than then. Behind the celebrity bestsellers is a diverse, chaotic, unstable, lively verbiage scene. Not everybody in it’s making money these days, and a lot of good works aren’t getting their deserved recognition. But I’d much rather have the current lit-landscape, with its faults and its opportunities, than the tweed-and-ivy past Miller yearns for, when bookmaking and bookselling was run almost exclusively by and for folks like him.

MISC. WAS PLEASANTLY SURPRISED at the announcement that Diahann Carroll would star in the touring version of the Sunset Boulevard musical, coming soon to Vancouver. We’d previously written that “race-blind casting” traditionally means all the starring roles in big commercial theatricals go to white folks. So we’re happy to note an exception (even if it’s an exception that proves the rule).

SINGIN’ THE BREWS: If you remember when Bud Dry was hawked as “The Alternative Beer,” get ready for another contender to that dubious title. New management at Maxwell’s, that longtime rock club inside a former Hoboken, NJ coffee factory (on what that PBS Baseball miniseries claimed was the first site where baseball as we know it was played), has installed a brewpub on the premises, with its own “Alternative Brew” and “Percussion Ale.” If market conditions seem plausible (right now the business press claims there’s an impending microbrew glut), they might get sold at other outlets, perhaps even out here.

LIVING OFF THE LAND: Eat the State!: A Forum for Anti-Authoritarian Political Opinion, Research, and Humor is an often-clever li’l four-page lefty newsletter. So far it’s been consistently witty and has had a good mix of local and national topics, though it leans a bit too heavy for my taste on the side of self-righteous ranting, too lightly on organizing and solution-seeking. I also have troubles with the name. At a time when even pork-barrel senators now purport to oppose “Big Government,” that ol’ punk-anarchist concept of “The State” seems almost like nostalgia for yesterday’s problems. The old nation-states are indeed being eaten, but it’s Global Business that’s doing the digesting. (Free weekly at the usual dropoff points; online at speech.csun.edu/ben/news/ets/; or $24/year from P.O. Box 85541, Seattle 98145.) Speaking of social theorizin’…

YOU’RE SO VEIN: I also have problems with the political piece in issue #2 of the regional visual-art journal Aorta, relating the Clinton/Dole rivalry to “The Twilight of The Patriarchy.” For nearly a quarter-century now, the leftist labeling of mainstream American society as “The Patriarchy” has utterly failed to recognize the significant contributions individual women have made in service to reactionary politics and social stagnation. After all, if women are capable of doing anything, they’re certainly capable of doing things you or I might not approve of. A writer living in the state of Craswell and Dixy Lee Ray oughta know this. Still speaking of social theorizin’…

GRIN AND BARE IT: As instigator of the cable-access show Political Playhouse, Philip Craft was a master provocateur, attracting the wrath of bluenoses like Sen. Gorton for his on-camera nudity and protest-comedy skits. Toward the end of his show’s two-year run, Craft had begun to move beyond simple protesting and had started to articulate a vision of his ideal alternative society based on practical anarchism. Unfortunately, his new self-published book The Fool on the Hill doesn’t spell out that vision, beyond calling for political power to be recentered onto the county level (an idea similar to ones expressed by the militia cults). Instead, he offers an autobiographical tale about cheating on his wife, taking lotsa drugs, getting investigated by the Feds for advocating some of those drugs on his show, taking on paranoid delusions, and hiding out in the woods. It’s a long way from Craft’s introductory claim that it’s “a paranoid comedy that will forever change the way you view the world… that conspires to bring down the political, economic, and religious institutions that enslave us today.” Rather, it’s a downbeat story of personal loss and confusion, imbued with a sense of vulnerability and humility unseen in Craft’s TV work. (Pay-what-you-can from P.O. Box 17320, Seattle 98107.)

WHAT I’LL MISS ABOUT ERNST HARDWARE: The clashing aromas of freshly-cut flowers and freshly-cut lumber. The annual Show Me How Fair in the old Coliseum. The Sonics “In The Paint” promotion. The slogan, “We’ve got a warehouse too; we just don’t make you shop in it.” And, of course, The Fellow In Yellow.

DUD RANCH: Montana’s got the (alleged) Unabomber, but in Seattle it’s the summer of the Unbomber! Indeed, we’ve got Unbombers all over town! Even though a certain politically ambitious prosecutor’s trying to throw the book at one alleged Unbomber, subsequent Unbombs continue to pop up everywhere! Since an Unbomb isn’t a bomb, it can be anything–unclaimed luggage, grocery bags, stalled cars, a garage-sale lamp, stray free samples of Honey Bunches of Oats, that Arch Deluxe box in the gutter–any unattended physical object of any appreciable size. Remember, don’t be a litterbug–you could get charged with planting an Unbomb, with un-threatening hundreds of innocent lives!

UPDATES: While the Off Ramp’s rebirth has taken a little longer than expected (don’t these things always?), its Denny/ Eastlake neighbor in noise, RKCNDY, may also arise from the ashes. Lori LaFavor, who booked many of the 1994-95 Sailors’ Union Hall shows, says she hopes to book a few all-ages shows in the space while the new owners get their remodeling plans and liquor-license application going… The couple who ran the Toaster Museum in Seattle’s AFLN and Wonderful World of Art galleries have moved to Portland and are raising funds to open a larger display of historic bread-burners there. To learn how to help write The Toaster Museum Foundation Inc., P.O. Box 11886, Portland, OR 97211, or email <ericn@SpiritOne.com>.

THE MAILBAG: Blaine Dollard writes, “What’s up with these buses?” It’s simple, really: In honor of King County taking over Metro Transit, a new luscious purple-based exterior color scheme was devised for the buses. But to save money, existing buses won’t be repainted until either (1) an advertiser pays to get a bus painted and that deal expires; or (2) a particular coach has its turn in the five-year cycle in which all the buses get repainted anyway. So from now until the new millennium, when you peer down the road to see if your bus is coming, you’ll have to squint to perceive either the luscious new colors or the old burger-chain browns (or for those weird ad buses, but that’s another item).

NO `SAX’ PUNS HERE: ‘Twas nice to unexpectedly spot the Billy Tipton Memorial Sax Quartet a few weeks back on Black Entertainment Television’s Jazz Discovery show, a mail-us-your-video-and-maybe-we’ll-play-it affair similar to MTV’s old Basement Tapes. It marked the first time I saw five white women on BET and it didn’t turn out to be an infomercial.

INTO THE DRINK: In the good ol’ days of the ’80s (trust me, they’re already being marketed by the nostalgia industry as “A Simpler Time”), the General Brewing Co. in Vancouver USA used to put fun little rebus picture puzzles inside the bottle caps of its Lucky Lager and generic “Beer Beer.” Pabst, which bought and closed General, still uses the puzzle-caps on its cheaper brands and malt liquors; unless you’re an Old English 800 fancier, you’re more likely to see such a cap strewn on the sidewalk than on a bottle you’ve personally bought. The gang at Portland’s Widmer Bros. Brewery must have remembered these; for their new bottled-beer line includes a line drawing inside the cap of two clinking glasses, the slogan “A Prost” (German for “toast”), and one of 20 different salutations (“To Palindromes,” “To Paleontologists,” “To Button Fly Jeans,” “To Firewalkers,” “To Dogs Named Steve,” “To the Platypus,” “To the Polar Bear Club”). Frankly, I’d rather have a rebus. At least with them, if you couldn’t solve it you knew you’d had enough. Speaking of beverages…

CALL TO ACTION 1: I previously asked if any of the column’s out-of-town readers could supply me with some of those Olestra fake-fat snacks. Nobody did, but now I’ve got another favor to ask. The Clearly Canadian drink company’s supposed to be launchingOrbitz, a soft drink with neon-colored “flavored gel spheres” floating in the bottle like edible little Lava Lamp bits, in selected test markets. Damn, I want some.

CALL TO ACTION 2:I now seek your opinions on whether the Sex Pistols’ slogan “Kill the Hippies” ever was, or is still, valid. Email your responses to clark@speakeasy.org. The more interesting replies will appear on this site sometime in September. Thank you.

MISC. SAYS GOODBYE this week to one of its favorite conglomerates, American Home Products, maybe the biggest company you never heard of. It’s being broken up, with divisions sold off, so management can focus on its drug operations (Anacin, Advil, Dristan, and many lucrative prescription patents). Unlike the late Beatrice, AHP kept its corporate profile low while promoting its brands (Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, Pam, Brach’s candy, Ecko kitchenware, Easy-Off, Aerowax, Black Flag) with near-monomaniacal aggression. It was be said if you didn’t have a headache before an Anacin ad, you had one after. When Procter & Gamble’s ’50s soap operas offered up Presbyterian homilies of hope and family alongside the tears and turmoil, AHP’s soaps (Love of Life, The Secret Storm) relished unabashed melodrama, the harsher the better. While AHP was never a household name, its contributions won’t be forgotten by anyone who ever dined on Beefaroni while listening to a Black Flag LP.

BLOCK THAT METAPHOR! (NY Times blurb, 5/6): “If television is the Elvis of communications media and the Internet is Nirvana, radio is Bach.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: From our pals in the Seattle Displacement Coalition comes Seattle’s Urban Counter-Point, a four-page tabloid chastising the city’s inaction against homelessness and its action against homeless people. It does a better job than anybody at explaining how and why Seattle’s political machine, giving lip service to “progressive” homilies while actually serving at the beck and call of big money, is “a system of establishment control that is more subtle and in many ways more effective than outright graft.” Issue #1 doesn’t propose many solutions to homelessness, but does get in some well-placed digs at public officials’ war against the poor, and promotes a public forum where more proactive policies will be debated (Mon. June 10, 6 p.m., downtown library). The paper’s free (donations accepted) from the Church Council of Greater Seattle, 4759 15th Ave. NE, Seattle 98105.

FOAMING: KIRO-TV’s feature series earlier this month about the “fake microbrew” phenomenon successfully revealed the philosophy that sets real “craft” brewers apart from not only mainstream beer, but from mainstream business in general. “Contract brewing” is the product of a notion, increasingly popular in American business, that all that matters is a product’s concept and its marketing; actually making the stuff is a technicality to be dealt with as expediently as possible. That philosophy is why ad agency Weiden & Kennedy and its stable of spookejocks earn more money from Nike than all the Third World sweatshoppers who actually make the shoes. Craft brewers, on the other hand, put great pride and/or elaborate PR into the brewing process, into being able to control and refine every step.

This lesson hasn’t been lost on Minott Wessinger, the Henry Weinhard heir who sold that company, got into the malt-liquor trade, then tried to re-enter mainstream beer in ’93 with Weiden & Kennedy’s Black Star ad campaign. Wessinger’s about to re-launch the Black Star brand, without W&K and with a new corporate identity. He’s now doing business as the Great Northern Brewing Co., and proudly advertising every aspect of his new brewhouse in Whitefish, Mont. Black Star will now be promoted as something as carefully produced as microbrews, but with a more mainstream taste.

THE SKINS GAME: Another International No-Diet Days has come and gone. This year, the week of body-acceptance forums and events followed a curious NY Times piece on high schoolers across America these days (girls and boys) refusing to undress in the shower. Apparently, if you believe the article, kids everywhere are hung up on not looking like supermodels and/or superjocks. (It doesn’t seem to get any better in the gay world–papers like the Village Voice are now full of ads with bare male chests, all completely pumped and completely hairless.) As one who is neither jock nor model, I say there’s billions of great body types out there. Standards of perfection are for machine tools, not people.

(Party games, entertainment, performance art, memories–the giant Misc. 10th Anniversary Party’s got ’em all. Sunday, June 2, 6 pm-whenever, at the Metropolis Gallery, University St. between 1st and 2nd downtown. Be there. Details at the Misc. World HQwebsite, <http://www.miscmedia.com>.)

UPDATE: Some months back I named the Wallingford Food Giant Seattle’s best full-size supermarket. Since then, the north end’s been abuzz w/rumors that the place was being sold to Alfalfa’s, the out-of-state yuppie health-food chain. Not so, insists FG management.

THE MAILBAG: I can say the most outrageous things and get no response (perhaps because, as I’ve learned, some folks just assume I’m kidding); while the slightest throwaway gag can cause the most irate responses. Like my little joke about Vancouver’s new Ford Theatre. I’ll readily accept the letter writers’ assertions that Canadians probably know more about American history than Americans know about Canadian history–or than Americans know about American history. I know enough about Canada to endorse DOA singer Joey Shithead’s campaign for the BC legislature (can’t ya see it, “The Honourable M.L.A. Shithead”?). On a related note…

CANADIAN CATHODE CORNER: Canada, especially Vancouver, is gaining awareness as the prime filming site for exploitation TV dramas. I wouldn’t be surprised if next fall Fox aired more Canadian-made prime-time hours than Canadian network CTV. I also wouldn’t be surprised if sci-fi conventions started circulating “fan fiction” stories in which the universes of all the Vancouver-filmed shows (X-Files, Strange Luck, Sliders, Profit, et al.) collided at a dimensional gateway somewhere near the Cambie St. Bridge.

REFLEX, RIP: The regional visual-art tabloid was great while it lasted, and (particularly under first editor Randy Gragg) provided frequent glimpses into the peculiar jargon of art-crit (‘tho sometimes I wished they’d run a glossary of terms). It illuminated issues surrounding the corporate/ institutional art world and the role of creative individuals therein. And it gave many artists precious review clippings. But it was never all it could be, or all its community needed. Its bimonthly schedule meant it could never recommend a show while it was still up. Its nonprofit-bureaucratic structure meant it was eternally begging for gifts from the same funding sources as the artists the paper advocated.

AD VERBS: Still recovering from its old pretentious “Lack of Pretense” ads, Subaru is turning toward marketing at specific market segments. As part of this, it’ll soon run specially-designed ads in lesbian magazines, touting its autos as the perfect acoutrement to a practical, sensible Womanlove lifestyle. Meanwhile, Elvira (aka Cassandra Peterson) has quit as a Coors spokeswitch–not due to Coors’ support of right-wing causes but ’cause indie brewery Beverage International offered to market her own line of Elvira Brews. Look for the first bottles in test markets by July.

LET ‘EM GO: EastsideWeek’s new “Independent Republic of the Eastside” promotion sounds a bit like certain secessionist movements in Montana and Idaho, or at least like these pro-sprawl “new county” movements across the Cascade foothills. On the good side, the promotion (devised largely by editor Skip Berger) calls into question the “community spirit” of folks who’ve moved to the burbs precisely to avoid civic commitment, to drive from office park to mall to cul-de-sac without feeling any expressed need for “public space.” And it gives Berger a chance to question some assumptions about suburban growth by offering alternatives: “Will we become Paris, Rome, Venice, or Orange County?” (Place your own joke answer here.)

DOME SWEET DOME: What to do with the Kingdome, with no baseball in three years and possibly no football? (The NFL’s hinted at demanding a new arena in return for keeping or replacing the Seahawks.) The obvious is to keep it for auto shows and tractor pulls, and as an exhibit annex for the Convention Center. The county’s been planning this anyway.

I say, let’s go build two new stadia, with as much private money as possible. Make the football field convertible for NHL hockey; make both convertible for trade shows.

Then take the existing Kingdome, gut its current interior, and rebuild it into the living and recreation space of the future. A World’s Fair domed-city fantasy made real, or a pansexual “intentional community” utopia. Level upon level of PoMo condos around the concourses, looking onto an indoor plaza and celebration zone. The mind reels with the possibilities! (Got any fantasy Dome uses of your own? Send ’em here.)

TRY TO IMAGINE playing Wheel of Fortune in pre-Mao Chinese. The puzzle only has one letter, but it takes thousands of turns to guess it. That’s the only way to imagine a game longer and more frustrating than Mariner baseball. Natch, the team’s first-ever division-title drive dragged out as frustratingly long as it could, until the letter finally got turned and turned out to be a “W.” Can’t tell at this writing how farther they’ll go, but even this level of victory erases what had been a comfortable, familiar “hapless” status. Just like the stadium scheme, in which the tax proponents snatched a narrow defeat from the jaws of a wide defeat, only to come back for an extra Legislative playoff.

IN OTHER ELECTION-FALLOUT STUFF, I’d like to think our anti-Commons rants had something to do with the defeat of that dubious plan to fund amenities for condo developers. But the defeat came not too long after the library and transit plans I liked also died. This town used to be a lot more generous about spending money when it didn’t have as many rich people in it.

ELSEWHERE IN POLITICSLAND: When I first glanced through George magazine, I figured it was a misguided corporate-media attempt to use gossip to make politics relevant to a new generation. On second reading, I concluded it was an attempt to use politics to make gossip relevant to a new generation. To young adults increasingly apathetic toward the doings of movie stars, corporate rockers and other media inventions (according to industry demographic surveys I’ve seen), the publishers of Elle and John Kennedy Jr. offer an attempt to connect that floating world to issues of actual importance, exemplified in a celebrity-party photo page headlined “We the People.” It’s a “We Are The World” with stinky perfume samples and bare-chested fashion ads. For a less-slick look at how a political magazine might be created for the millennium’s-end era, pick up a free copy of the Portland-created Modern America at Borders or access its website, <<http://www.modernamerica.com>>. Many of its contributors are conservative, but they’re the kind of conservative I could hold a reasoned argument with. I can even almost forgive it for using that most-overused article-title cliché, “The Rise and Rise of….”

HIP HOPS: Anheuser-Busch held a PR fete and tasting party for its new fake microbrews at The Fifth Avenue Place (a Belltown rental hall), all done up with sawdust floors and displays of beer memorabilia. The brands display the names (and allegedly the formulae) of brands A-B marketed in the 1890s. The copper-colored Muenchener is a hearty quaff that might almost substitute for a micro if you’re someplace where nothing better’s around. Black & Tan tastes a little like the stout-and-ale cocktail of the same name, but not really. Faust is the least of the bunch (like a watered-down Full Sail) but it’s got the coolest label, depicting a theatrical devil (I can just see teams of Faust Girls touring Pioneer Square in red jumpsuits with flannel devil tails).

`XTREME’ PREJUDICE: Matt Groening’s Life in Hell used to run an annual list of “Forbidden Words” for the new year. If he were still doing it, I’d nominate “extreme” and its recent variation “Xtreme.” Marketers everywhere are out to exploit that “extreme sports” fad. Afri-Cola’s consumer-hype number is 800-GO-XTREME. And Pacific Northwest Bank offers an “Xtreme CD.” Easy why companies want to identify with snowboarding, Rollerblading, bungee and even the socially-maligned skateboarding. They bear a vener of “alternative” or even “punk” street-cred, but can be interpreted to celebrate today’s “lean and mean” corporate aesthetic–especially the way ads downplay the camaraderie of group noncompetitive adventure and emphasizing the solitary white-boy athlete triumphing over gravity and other squares’ laws. One can imagine your Benzo-drivin,’ cell-phone-yappin’ New Right hustler imagining himself as a sailboarder of business, riding waves of Power and Money while conquering the turbulence of do-gooder environmentalists and regulators.

ELSEWHERE IN HYPELAND: Radio Inside, an MGM/UA direct-to-video movie, stars erstwhile local actress Sheryl Lee; but the biggest headline on the video box is for its “HIP ALTERNATIVE SOUNDTRACK With Today’s Hottest Artists.”

Welcome, good buddy, to the high-rollin’ 10/4 Misc., in which we attempt to figure out the rationale behind the recent rash of beers with dog names. There’s already Red Wolf and Red Dog (one’s owned by Coors, the other by Busch, but I can’t remember which is which). Now, Seagram’s trying to get into the beer biz with something entering local test markets this week called Coyote. Dunno ’bout you, but as one who grew up in a dog-owning household, the association of yellowish-colored liquids with dogs is not an appetizing one.

WITH POPULARITY comes a wider audience not all in on the same cultural reference points. Some folks thought that recent Stranger Performance Issue cover was “kiddie porn.” (It was even banned by the Spokane post office!) It was really taken from an early-’60s lesbian-domination photo book, originally distributed in the pre-Stonewall gay underground. The brouhaha over it shows how folks “read” images based on their own suppositions. I was more shocked by a P-I front page the same week, with banner photos of glass-art renditions of what obviously were a diaphragm, a uterus and a dildo — with a headline about how the artists were “Showing Off Their Talent at Blowing.”

KNIT PICKING: I don’t think the discontinued Calvin Klein ads were “kiddie porn” either (more like deliberately antisexual sleaze, using old underground photography as another retro-pop-cult “inspiration”). However, there’s now a line of junior-size knit tops called Betty Blue. Do teenage girls wearing the tops know about the movie of the same name? Quite possibly. Do moms buying ’em for their daughters know about the movie? Maybe not.

TAB KEYS: For those of you still stuck in post-adolescent snickering, the Weekly World News is now on America Online. I doubt it’ll be a hit there. It removes the only thing I like about the paper, its typography. Besides, online distribution too effectively targets that made-to-be-laughed-at tabloid’s real target audience of fratboys and hipster wannabes, negating the effect of imagining you’re the only WWN reader who knows it’s a joke.

REBEL WITHOUT A LUNG: Hope you’re ready for New Left nostalgia, corporate-style; for here come Politix cigarettes, with a peace hand-sign and a rainbow on the pack. It’s one of several brands (along with Sedona, exploiting the Arizona new-age colony of the same name) from the pseudonymous Moonlight Tobacco Co. (really R.J. Reynolds). The NY Times business-section story about Reynolds’s latest gimmick came the same day as a front-page story about the megabux being shoveled from the cig industry into GOP campaign funds…. Elsewhere in the product world, Coca-Cola quietly dropped OK Soda from its remaining test-market regions, three months after it ceased to be sold here. Chalk it up as another failure from Portland ad whizzes Wieden & Kennedy (of Subaru “Lack of Pretense Days” and Black Star Beer infamy). W&K’s string of flops may revive the old-school ad theory that cleverness might get your agency famous within the ad biz but doesn’t move product.

E.T. STAY HOME: The AP reported “three self-styled mediums” in Sofia, Bulgaria led some 1,500 followers to an airstrip to await eight space ships. Among other things, the mediums promised the aliens would help the poor Balkan country pay its $12.9 billion foreign debt. No non-earthers showed up. Just as well; if the space people had acted like Bulgaria’s last patron state, the ol’ USSR, the financial aid would’ve been in inconvertible currency that could only be spent in its home country.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, recall the words recited by Tom Berenger as Brigham Young’s bodyguard in the cable movie Avenging Angel: “The problem with polygamy is when you have 27 wives and 56 children, one of them is just bound to turn out as dirt stupid and pig ugly as you.”

Mark your calendar to attend the book release party for my hefty tome, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, Sun., 10/15 at the Crocodile. It’s 21-plus, but an all-ages reading event’s in the works for later this month. More info at the Misc. World HQ website.

Student Food:

Don’t Demand Better

Essay for the Stranger, 9/27/95

The most important rule to eating on a student’s budget: Don’t learn to expect better. While you’re (I hope) training your mind to discern ever more subtle gradients of thought, don’t train your palate to demand more than you can now afford to eat. I know microbrew drinkers who order at least one Bud (or even Schaffer) per drinking session, so they don’t lose tolerance for the cheaper grain-water. The same principle goes with solid food. You can get some gourmet restaurant entrees for the price of a CD, but too many and you’ll be miserable with what you have to eat the rest of the time. If you must eat fancy, join an ethnic-studies club that makes joint meals or take an Experimental College cooking class.

Much of what I say won’t apply to dorm residents, who face limited facilities and space for preparing their own meals. Even then, there are alternatives to the dorm cafeteria. Like an artist I know who’s not supposed to live in her work studio but does anyway, you can sneak in a mini-microwave and/or a hotplate. Even without a mini-freezer to store stuff, you can stock up on unfrozen microwave foods like Top Shelf and buy the occasional Michelena’s or Healthy Choice goodie for same-day use.

If and when you get kitchen access, such as in a rental house, a universe of modest eating opportunities awaits, including that monthly ritual of the shared household, The Costco Run! Giant sizes of everything: pre-made salad in a bag, cereal, crackers, Danish cookie tins, five-pound packs of hot dogs, and all the free samples of gourmet frozen entrees you can eat. But remember, it’s no bargain if you can’t eat it all before it spoils or you can’t stand the sight of it anymore.

More conveniently sized bargains await at dollar stores. You can’t get a complete diet there but you can stock up on pasta and sauce, canned veggies, foil-pouch juice drinks, and assorted oriental noodle products. TopRamen, Cup Noodles, Bowl Noodle, etc. have long been the choice for many who prefer to spend little time eating and no time cooking. But beware, before long you’ll confront one of food’s great mysteries: What is “Oriental Flavor”? Best answer I heard had something to do with a line in the prologue of You Only Live Twice.

You can go beyond convenience into real cooking, yet stay in budget, with the student eater’s secret weapons: Calrose rice, beans, pasta, curry, stew (I had a housemate who ate from the same ongoing stewpot all week and spent the money he saved on Glenlivet), restaurant-supply stores like Serco and Pacific Food Importers, bakery outlet stores (closest to the U: Oroweat in lower Wallingford), and knowing where the more obscure bargains are. Your first tip: the big bags of “unfortunate fortune cookies” at the House of Rice on the Ave. Good hunting, and good eating.

Welcome back to Misc., the column that’s still had it with these expensive imports by local bands. When’s one of our newfangled Seattle music millionaires gonna start a label to release the Glitterhouse acts in North America where they belong?

THE FINE PRINT (back label of a Western Family Toilet Bowl Cleaner): “This product is safe for use around pets. However, it is always best that pets do not drink water from toilet.”

SUDSLESS: In the wake of some so-far successful shows at the Sailors Union hall on 1st, several other all-ages show sites are popping up, including Club 449 in Greenwood (the former G-Note tavern, now a “clean and sober” dance club that’s added rock Wed. nights in addition to its normal 12-stepper oriented adult DJ formats weekends) and The Black Citroen in Fremont (a beautifully rustic garage-turned-coffeehouse). The latter is only all-ages as a provisional format; it’s already applied for a liquor license. As a 21-plus venue it might pick up some of the north end live alt-music slack dropped when the University Sportsbar moved to “young country.” Elsewhere in 21-plusland, the Weathered Wall will have new owners as soon as the Liquor Board approves. The new guys plan to drop live shows in favor of something approximating the WW’s original all-DJ format.

MOTORCYCLE MAMMON: Remember when Harleys were associated with Hell’s Angels instead of Young Republicans? (Given a choice, I’d feel much safer among the Hell’s Angels.) Now there’s Harley Davidson Motorclothes on 4th, selling new leather gear and assorted licensed products, including cans of the official Harley Davidson coffee (but not Harley Heavy Beer or H-D cigarettes yet). The store has a not-for-sale motorcycle in the window, but the only motorcycling-related product it sells is motor oil.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: For two decades now, the ultimate perjorative for a showy, shallow hippie was “Granolahead.” The imagery behind the insult was perfect; granola can be a high-fat, high-calorie sweetened foodstuff that still bears the image of something “good for you.” But now, the false image of granola is being stripped away, revealing the chewy oatmeal-honey-brown sugar concoction as just another great American food ingulgence. This reimaging can be partly credited to RJR Nabisco and its new Oreo Granola Bars! They taste better than they sound or look. The oatmeal and glaze blend perfectly with the crumbled-and-solidified cookie crumbs and blotches of “Creme.”

NETTING: From time to time, I’ve advocated the ideal direction for the Info Hi-Way as “many-to-many” communication, not “one-to-many” monopolized media. The pivotal breakthrough in achieving this has been announced, and it’s from none other than one of the most monopolistically-minded companies in the media biz, TCI Cable. In partnership with a company run by one of the Hearst descendents, TCI says it’s gonna offer “@ Home,” a service connecting home PCs to its cable lines and from there to the Internet and commercial online services. It won’t be available anywhere until the end of the year, and might take years to get onto your local cable hookup. But if and when it does show (and if TCI doesn’t ruin it by only offering limited Net access), it’ll be the hi-bandwidth answer to anyone’s indie-networking wet dreams, ‘cuz TCI’s PR people promise transmission rates of a megabyte in three seconds. Imagine: live one-way near-broadcast-quality video, or live two-way CD ROM-quality video and other multimedia applications. Local bulletin board systems made available by Telnet software to anyone anywhere, without extra long-distance charges. CD-quality audio downloaded at twice playback speed. And all this with content choices decided not by a few big corporations but by anybody who can get their stuff together and can hook up a “server” computer (as a sometime acquaintance of hardware hackers, I know it to be a task that can be either cheap or easy but not both).

STATE HEALTH CARE REFORM `AMENDED’: The operation was a success. The patient died.

EARLY WARNING: This year’s annual column anniversary party, Fun with Misc., will be an all-ages gathering Thurs., 6/8 at the Metropolis Gallery (downtown on University between 1st and 2nd). Details forthcoming.

As boosters of local small business, Misc. is pleased as punch that Hale’s Ales is building a new facility on Leary Way, but slightly saddened that it’s going to take over the site now occupied by one of my all-time favorite Seattle building names, the House of Hose.

DISCLAIMER OF THE WEEK (seen before a body-piercing segment on the Lifetime cable fashion show Ooh La La): “Warning! The following piece contains images some viewers may find sorta gross.”

THE FINE PRINT (back label of a Western Family Toilet Bowl Cleaner): “This product is safe for use around pets. However, it is always best that pets do not drink water from toilet.”

STUFF I GET IN THE MAIL: Each week I get PR directives that just don’t warrant a complete column item, yet are good for at least a moment’s reflection. F’r instance: Ex-KCMU manager Chris Knab now leads seminars on how to make it in the music-marketing biz. The four-week course costs $149… There’s something out for this summer called the Carol Woir Slimsuit (“The Swimsuit With A Personality”), a one-piece women’s swimsuit with a built-in corset-like thingie. Its ads say “Lose An Inch, Gain The Glamour”… C-Space, a biweekly forum/ support meeting for local S/M pursuers, is hanging up its spikes for the last time after five years. Speaking of postal submissions…

NO MILK, THANKS: I was amused when a reader sent in six pages clipped from a Cheri magazine pictorial about nude waitresses at one “Big Cups Coffeehouse.” The story claims the café’s been in business in Seattle for four years. It’s all fictional, of course (it probably wouldn’t even be legal here). Florida and Texas, though, have had a tradition of novelty nude businesses (car washes, laundromats, donut shops, pool halls); so the concept might seem plausible to some Cheri readers. Speaking of stapled Seattle sightings…

THE GOOD LOAF: Somewhat more factual than the Cheri pictorial was the May Esquire article about Seattle’s “baby boom slackers,” whitebread liberal-arts grads of the magazine’s target demographic who used to have time-consumin’ bigtime careers but now hang out at the Honey Bear Bakery, having chosen “voluntary simplicity” instead of the work-hard-spend-hard ideology long advocated by the magazine. I certainly hope the mag’s readers will realize the selectivity it used. The story notes that only 70 percent of U.S. adult males now work full-time year-round at one job; but from personal knowledge I can assure you a lot of those guys walking around in the daytime with self-DTP’d “consultant” business cards aren’t there fully by choice. Not to mention the millions who haven’t had the chance to quit a well-paying job. Speaking of the world of work…

ON THE MAKE: Was reminded three times this month of the good ol’ days of American business, the days when this country was interested in making things instead of just marketing them. The first was the Times obit for Weyerhaeuser exec Norton Clapp. The article’s lead labeled Clapp with the now-quaint rubric of “industrialist.” The second was Our World, the monthly USA Today ad supplement touting things like new concrete-fabrication plants in ex-Soviet republics. The third was when I got to play with a friend’s CD-ROM drive. Among his discs was The Time Almanac, with texts and pix from old Time magazines thru the decades. But it didn’t have the real joy of collecting old Time issues, the ads. Old Time ads from the ’40s and ’50s are wonderful evocations of a time when the Opinion Makers of most towns outside NYC were bourbon-swillin’, tweed-wearin’ managers of small and midsize manufacturing plants. The ads pushed roller bearings, conveyor belts, commercial air conditioning systems, semi rigs, axle greases, grinding wheels, and all that other cool stuff you never see around the house. I’d much rather see more ads of that type than the ads you see in today’s Time for import luxury cars and prescription hair-growth tonic. Speaking of CD-ROMS…

WINDOW PEEPING: The thing about those new X-rated videos on CD-ROM is that the images are so small and lo-res, the old adage about risking blindness via overuse might in this case actually be true.

Here at Misc. we’re anxiously counting down the days (25 on the day this ish comes out) until KSTW starts running CBS shows. Since That Trial will probably still be going on, the big network switch means starting March 13 you won’t see Young & Restless on channel 11 instead of not seeing it on channel 7.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Seattle Volunteer is a handy four-page newsletter run by Andrew Stewart and Laurie Roth, alerting readers to some of the myriad ways they can invest time-n’-sweat to build a better community. It offers free 50-word notices every other month for arts, AIDS, environment, health, education, and political groups that could use your help. The third issue should be out for free next week at some of the same places this paper’s at; or you can subscribe by sending a donation ($25 or more preferred) to P.O. Box 70402, Seattle 98107.

WHICH AD D’YA READ?: Molson Ice beer ad, 1995: “Don’t worry. Your tongue won’t stick.” Rainier Ice ad, 1994: “Warning: Keep tongue off billboard.”

NORTH OF THE BORDER: The fanning out of Hollywood bigshots across the western states continues. I’m told the most recently “discovered” homesite for frequent-flier showbiz commuters is the outer exurbs of Boise. As you’ve seen from the Little Hollywoods in New Mexico, Montana, Colorado and the San Juans, when the L.A. types show up three things tend to happen: 1) real estate prices soar so locals can’t afford to live there anymore; 2) these millionaires who proudly live half a gas tank from the closest supermarket and 100 gallons of jet fuel from their jobs start preaching to the locals about eco-consciousness; and 3) they bring in their favorite L.A. chefs to invent a “traditional regional cuisine” for the area. It’ll be fun to find out what the “traditional regional cuisine” becomes for a state whose very license plates promote “Famous Potatoes,” whose only movie-based association with dining came from Steve Martin’s cameo in The Muppet Movie, as a waiter offering “Sparkling Muscatel by Fine Wines of Idaho.”

NOT IN THE CARDS: Our Pike St. pals at Edge of the Circle Books submitted an ad to KNDD that began as follows: “Magick, Witchcraft, Paganism; words once whispered are now spoken boldly. Though they cut down the sacred groves, burned our religious texts, and tortured and killed people beyond counting for the `crime’ of witchcraft, our numbers have grown so large that they cannot stop us.” The ad that ran for one day before the station banned it after receiving 25 complaining phone calls. The Viacom-owned station (which had run other ads from the store for three years) first asked the store to submit a “less offensive” spot, then agreed to refund its money.

BEAMING: Viacom boss Sumner Redstone has spoken of one of his new acquisitions, Star Trek, as a “global branded identity.” Several analysts over the years have seen the United Federation of Planets as a metaphor for an cold-war-era American self-image, an image of the benevolent colonist bringing order and commerce while allowing at least on-paper autonomy to its “partners.” A case could now be made for the Federation reflecting Hollywood’s self image of a culture empire enveloping the universe, either smothering local arts and customs or using them to its ends. Redstone wants to have everybody on at least this planet viewing, reading and listening to the same things. This is the polar opposite of what many of the acts now on KNDD believe or originally believed.

As further example, note the Week in Rock segment on MTV (another Viacom property) about indie labels–it gave most of its camera time to those “indies” that have alliances with or are part of the Big Six record giants; it talked about the likes of Sub Pop not as patrons of marginal voices but as generators of future major-label stars; and it was peppered with ex-indie singers who unanimously assured viewers that an act could get screwed by an indie just like by a major.

Mind you, there’s plenty that Big Entertainment has given us (I’ve been heard to compare modern American politics to the ST episode with the Evil Kirk vs. the Ineffectual Kirk). But it’s time to put a new concept to work. Instead of global identities, we need to promote and empower the whole motley world at home and abroad. Make it so.